The Irish Woman Who Taught the French How to Cook

It's of little surprise that France has its own Domestic Goddess: as well-known there as Nigella is here, with over a million cookbook sales under her belt and a spot on French Vogue's list of the 40 most influential women in the country.

What may cause an involuntary raise of the eyebrow is to learn that she is Northern Irish; a farmer’s daughter born and bred near Belfast, in the County Antrim countryside.

Even more astonishing is that though Trish Deseine has been credited with fundamentally changing the way ordinary French families cook, she’s not even a household name in her homeland - except among a select band of foodies who have stumbled upon her fuss-free recipes and kept her a well-guarded secret.

But that could all be about to change. After 30 years of living across the Channel, and nearly 20 getting away with telling the French how to cook (and to keep it simple, at that), Deseine is finally moving closer to home, having packed up her renovated boulangerie in Beziers and driven the 2000 kilometres to the jagged Sheep’s Head peninsula in West Cork, with cocker spaniel, Jack in tow.

Today, as her left-hand drive Peugeot pulls up outside the Good Things Cafe in Skibbereen, its boot packed to the brim with boxes of wine direct from the vineyards surrounding her home in the Languedoc, it is immediately obvious that this is a woman who effortlessly straddles two cultures.

Part-Parisienne, part-country chic, Deseine is dressed top-to-toe in elegant black with gently coiffed blonde hair, but wearing the barest trace of make-up and a pair of muddy black wellies, ready to walk Jack in the fields surrounding her rented cottage.

She is also fizzing with excitement at being back, and passionate about the traditional food scene here - ooh-ing and ahh-ing over the locally sourced ingredients on the menu.

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After years spent writing about French cooking and produce, West Cork is where she wrote Home last year - a mighty celebration of everything that is good and pure about traditional Irish cooking, which made her fall in love with it all over again.

"It wasn't sexy food," she says, "it's the opposite of Ottolenghi, not at all what is going on at the moment. But I'm so proud of it.

“It was a way of saying goodbye to France for me. I knew by then that I wanted to move here. It was my way of saying:

‘This is where I’m going next’.”

But then, 51-year-old Deseine seems to have always been on the move. She left the beef farm where she grew up to study French at Edinburgh, where she met her French ex-husband. Having followed him to Paris, they settled in the affluent suburb of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where they had four children - three sons and a daughter, now in their teens and early twenties - and were “blissfully happy” for 10 years.

“We had a wonderful time with the most amazing food and parties all the time. But it all fell apart, and when my husband and I divorced [in 2006] I moved to a little apartment in the Belleville area of Paris.”

Deseine never sought out fame and fortune, but after being spotted by a publisher at a trade fair, where she was demonstrating recipes for the mail order ingredients company she then ran, she was invited to write a cookbook.

Petits Plats Entre Amis (Food with Friends), a collection of simple recipes requiring few ingredients and just as few steps - her mantra is "maximum taste, minimum fuss" - was a breath of fresh air in a market laden with exacting manuals from formally-trained chefs. It quickly became a hit and a permanent fixture in kitchens across France, going on to win the prestigious Laduree prize.

"I hadn't planned any of it," she says, clearly still tickled pink at her unexpected success. "The foodie craze was just starting in the UK - Nigella and Jamie, with their 'unchefy' approach, were becoming household names. But France is always two years behind the major trends, especially if it's about food - they don't really want to be told."

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But tell them she did. “The French had a lot to learn about home cooking then,” she says. “They needed to relax and to be more open-minded about different food cultures. It was also seen to be anti-feminist to be mad about cooking. My French contemporaries had young kids and full-time jobs and most of them didn’t cook. If they did, they certainly didn’t want to hear it from a male chef.”

Despite a couple of scathing reviews from French foodies, she went on to write 11 more, inspiring an entire generation of home cooks.

“It was just a bit of a laugh and then it took off. I started working for Elle magazine, I was cooking with chefs - I went to Noma and fed Rene Redzepi olive oil and chocolate before he was famous.”

But however famous she became, her food remained grounded. To this day, she has never taken a cooking class and her approach is rooted in the simple belief that good, seasonal ingredients prepared lovingly are among the greatest pleasures in life.

Here, she concedes that the French have always had it right. “They have this expectation that they are going to get pleasure from their food. That slightly obsessive foodie conversation that people have in the UK, which is still within the realms of hipsterdom, is just something totally natural in France.”

And it’s this epicurean existence that she is seeking out here in West Cork, a burgeoning foodie haven that could rival the Languedoc.

With her children settled at college or beginning their careers - her eldest son, Corentin, 22, has begun training as a chef in Paris - Deseine is content to have no particular plans, herself, for once.

“I want to get back to that feeling I had in the kitchen when I was doing the first books, when I was cooking with no stress and no expectations. I want to shop for what looks best and then come home and cook it.”

Won’t she miss her little bolthole in Paris or her Beziers boulangerie? “I realise that I like and I need the duality of the two bases. I want to keep the bricks and mortar in the south of France because I love that house. But for now, I’m happy here.”

And with that she is off to unpack those cases of wine and take the dog for a walk: thoughts of the freshly-caught fish she will experiment with tonight, for an Irish twist on soupe de poisson, swimming around her head.

* Home: Recipes from Ireland, by Trish Deseine, is published by Hachette Cuisine.

The Daily Telegraph